Top 10: 2025 So Far
Halfway through this foul year of our Lord, the cinema of the dead reigns supreme.
Land of Terror.
The words in red glaring on my wall through this cruel, colorful month of June. Below the words a hazy, unforgiving landscape filled with smoke and churning rock and dinosaurs and other fanged and flying giants. It’s a scene drawn by Frank Frazetta for a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs (one of twelve in my Frazetta x Burroughs 2025 Calendar) — a hollow earth as living monument to the Lovecraftian big-bang birthing canal of human chaos going back farther than the rocks themselves.
Meanwhile, on Earth’s surface, it’s Summer ‘25 baby and the future’s so bright we gotta wear shades. Half a year of sturm und drang and fractal terror on the global stage — fuckboi oligarchs and fascist clown-regimes strip the dying imperial nation-states for parts — exporting war, famine, and genocide in a last-ditch cosplay o’ the glory days. As for us, the rabble undead creeping around the edges of every American drag, nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired.
The movies of 2025, such as they are at the halfway mark, are as ample reflections of the dirty chaos and piquant smell of death pervading our times as any other piece of bullshit media or AI slop you’re likely to doom-scroll upon as you go about your day — recalling the words of the other all-American writer called Burroughs (you know, the wise old Queer one):
America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil
before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.
And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practiced, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt….
...But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from.
Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street--every block of houses has its own bar and drug store and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you.
But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers nor the cream colored plastic, nor the dim neon.
Not even the TV.
Here are my top 10 movies of 2025 so far…
28 Years Later
“As the world falls around us, how will we brave its cruelties?”
That’s a quote from last year’s sci-fi-apocalyptic epic, Furiosa. But it echoes through the coming-of-age Heart of Darkness journey of 28 Years Later. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's long-awaited return to the defining zombie franchise of the 21st Century starts off like a back-to-basics sequel — sending a troubled Aaron-Taylor Johnson and son Spike (Alfie Williams) on a rite-of-passage survival mission on Britain’s mainland from their fortified island village. Then Boyle’s adept and fearlessly experimental hand guides us through some killer boots-on-the-ground zombie action (and, yes, some thick zombie dong) and into the rest of Garland’s episodic folk-horror screenplay in which the young Spike’s quest to cure his ailing Mother (Jodie Comer) becomes a weird heavy-genre admonishment to “choose life” among the rubble of our dying (or dead) empires.
28 Years Later is still in theaters.
Black Bag
Old Auntie Britannia really done taught us everything we know about imperialism ain’t she. From recapitulating the tired myths of the Old World to maintaining the global-order status quo via espionage games. Nah but there still ain’t nothin’ hits quite like a British spy thriller amirite? Especially when a stylish American filmmaker get their hands on the material hehe. Enter Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag (admittedly one of three contenders on this list for best picture of the year so far, had I indulged in ranking - have to wait till the end of the year for that one, sweeties). Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play a Nick-and-Nora-style spy couple who find themselves at the center of a mole hunt at MI6. The catch: Blanchett is one of five suspects and Fassbender has been assigned to suss out the mole. The sleek, sexy cat-and-mouse game that follows makes for one of the least complicated and most entertaining good-ole-fashioned capital-m movies of recent memory. A truly exceptional case of popcorn cinema for adults, in 2025 no less.
Black Bag is streaming on Peacock.
Friendship
Every conceivable facet of American life is now a farcical mutation of itself—none more absurd than the act of suburban male bonding. With Tim Robinson’s endlessly abrasive modern-male persona as its engine, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship makes a stark, immediate case for best comedy of the year. It’s something of a millennial Cable Guy, written with a dark, absurd satirical bent that lands somewhere between Little Murders and Dumb and Dumber. Robinson rips through this tale of a suburban dad who becomes obsessed with his charismatic local weatherman neighbor (Paul Rudd) in what might easily have rested on being a feature-length I Think You Should Leave sketch. But behind the camera, DeYoung infuses the whole thing with an underlying nervous gravitas—all without getting overly pretentious or like mumblecore with it feel me? My bros: consider us all officially cooked.
Friendship is available to rent or own on digital.
The Monkey
The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had been ever so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.
Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs follow-up, based on the short story by Stephen King, somehow proves a more masterful modern American-gothic tale, this time by way of “Itchy and Scratchy” and The Big Lebowski rather than Unsolved Mysteries and The Silence of the Lambs. “Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways,” says Perkins of the life experience that inspired him to make The Monkey a slapstick horror-comedy. “I spent a lot of my life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad. It all seemed inherently unfair. You personalize the grief: 'Why is this happening to me?' But I'm older now and you realize this shit happens to everyone.” I lost my Dad to a painful drawn-out illness in 2020, then sat back and watched the rest of the world suffer new, diabolical waves of death and decay half-decade that followed. It’s only in the last year or so that I’ve felt a tangible if not hard-won return to life and a workable sense of perspective around the whole thing. The Monkey was one of those movies that truly met me where I’m at with a morbid yet playful sense of humor and underlying sweetness to King’s story of a wind-up toy Monkey that portends catastrophic death every time it bangs on its little drum. Everyone dies. And sometimes, everyone dies at the same time. So hold your loved ones close and dance with them while the blood’s still flowing through your toes.
The Monkey is available to rent or own on digital.
Presence
Soderbergh’s the fuckin’ man what can I tell ya? Before Black Bag (like right before — two months even), Steven Soderbergh and veteran screenwriter David Koepp put out an experimental little haunted-house movie that’s absolutely brimming with the type of scrap and cinematic bare-bonesness that very few commercial filmmakers can access anymore. Soderbergh operates a handheld camera for the entirety of this ghost story, acting as the POV of the mysterious spectral entity haunting a despondent suburban family in their new home. In less capable hands that’d be more gimmick than worthy formal challenge, but Soderbergh literally moves through Koepp’s modest but solid script with a palpable sense of continued willingness to evolve with an ever-changing cinema landscape. Nobody among his Gen-X Sundance generation of peers has worn the last decade or so as well as Soderbergh in that sense.
Presence is streaming on Hulu.
Shifty
England is a dead empire whose bitter throes at the end of the 20th Century spell a similar, if not more absurd, disaster for our crumbling, happy-meal-reich across the pond. Shifty is the third Adam Curtis docuseries/multi-part essay film I’ve included in a best-of-year movie list alongside, well, actual feature-length narrative films. Probably won’t be the last if I’m honest. May seem like a stretch, but that’s the thing with these Curtis joints, man. They not only defy your typical genre or medium categorization in terms of TV vs. film, etc., but also represent filmmaking reduced to its core elements: moving images foraged from disparate sources, spliced together to form new meanings. Elemental. Primal. And yet, there’s no visual media experience quite like an Adam Curtis film.
Shifty sees Curtis working on the same thesis as his last two docs, 2021’s Cant Get You Out of My Head and 2022’s TraumaZone, that the age of the individual has eroded our ability to agree on a collective reality, throwing societies into permanent collapse and leaving everyday folks with nothing to hold onto but money and remixed images of the past. With Britain as his main subject this time around, Curtis leaves you with less hope for the future than ever before, as encapsulated by Darren Carver-Balsiger’s Letterboxd review:
The world became a remix, with no more truth and no more history. The liberal intelligentsia cocooned themselves away from the working class and the world of finance took power. Britain sold its economy to a handful of people, leaving ordinary people with nothing except imported goods and unstable jobs while all the money sits with the elite. Millions suffer so a few cunts can profit from the last bits of scrap worth selling. Self-interest was sold as the only need we have, creating generations of politicians who believe in nothing. So now nostalgia for a murderous empire becomes an ointment for the dispossessed, because parsing current reality is too difficult and painful. Let's dance in the ruins of Britain, what else can we do?
Shifty is streaming on BBC iPlayer and available on YouTube.
The Shrouds
David Cronenberg’s back he’s so back… again. Fresh off the return to form of 2022’s Crimes of the Future, the godfather of body horror crushes another laid-back speculative sci-fi conspiracy movie about grieving and the body in an age of screens, AI, and social disembodiment. Cronenberg wrote this movie as a conscious response to his wife’s passing in 2017—imbuing the plight of the protagonist Karsh (Vincent Cassell), who’s deceased wife’s body has gone missing from his high-tech gravesite, with the confused, conspiratorial emotional state that befalls anyone dealing with the sudden loss of a life partner, regardless of whether there’s an actual corporate or political conspiracy behind it all. “While watching it very much holds you at arms-length with Cronenberg's coldness, bizarre dialogue, intentional opaqueness and the weird, stilted performances,” writes Will Menaker. “Am I enjoying this? What's going on here? It doesn't really add up to anything until somehow against all odds, the last scene hits like a sledgehammer and the circle closes up.”
The Flesh is Dead. Long live the New Flesh.
The Shrouds streams on The Criterion Channel July 8th.
They Call Her Death
Don’t let the trailer fool you: Yer typical Tarantino/’70s Grindhouse-larping nostalgia trip, this ain’t. Sure, it’s rather pointedly shot on Kodak film, on a $40,000 budget, with costumes and performances that evoke a look and feel you’d associate with the grungier spaghetti Westerns of Corbucci. But They Call Her Death rests neither on its gender-swapped frontier revenge tale nor its Grindhouse reference points. Instead, director Austin Snell & crew push past those otherwise well-worn contrivances in favor of increasingly unique, contemplative moments and compositions. All while still delivering the ball-busting (like actually) low-budget violence and yeehaw-cowboy stuff you’d want from this sorta thing.
They Call Her Death is streaming on Shudder and AMC+.
The Ugly Stepsister
A psychotronic Trad-Tok-nightmare take on a classic fairy tale—grimmer than Grimm with a John Waters-like sense of humor and a body-horror bent that says more about the visceral plight of womanhood (then and now) than last year’s commercially overrated The Substance ever could. The Ugly Stepsister fuckin’ rips man. This “isn’t some gimmicky, role-reversed empowerment manifesto,” writes Sex Ray Specs on Letterboxd. “Writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt [blends] dissociative fantasy with raw, ordinary emotional aches, [presenting] a fully realized character in the act of self-objectification. You can practically smell your own teenage mortification.”
The Ugly Stepsister is streaming on Shudder and AMC+.
Warfare
Between helming last year’s Civil War and writing 28 Years Later, Alex Garland put out a war movie that not only works, but speaks to the endless, irredeemable hellscape wrought by the American military industrial complex in the 21st Century without ever diving into literal real-world politics. Co-directed by combat veteran Ray Mendoza and drawn directly from his memories of a lethal Navy SEAL mission in Iraq, Warfare sees Garland approach the scenario with the laser-focused formalism and airtight suspense of a single-location De Palma thriller. The result is a war movie that’s both the virtual antithesis to and logical end point of every other modern war movie you’ve ever seen. Frank Frazetta once said, “What I do is create images, period.” With Warfare, Garland reminds us how elemental image-making is often the best way to capture the human heart’s most profound pain points and atrocities.
Warfare is available to rent or own on digital.
